Tips for buying Soviet cameras

Ancient Soviet lenses fetch solid prices nowadays, not least because they're fast, low contrast and perfectly short of sharp, giving a no-effort "filmic" look to digital camera footage. The cameras themselves are cult items too, for stills shooters at least, but the get-lucky-on-eBay game is far more fraught with risk. — Read the rest

1h

The "dumb TV" is almost dead

As of 2020, writes Nirav Patel, all the fancy TV brands load their sets with tracking, UI advertising and junkware, and short of nerdy shenanigans (such as buying a Raspberry Pi and setting it up as an ad-killing DNS proxy) there's no practical way to get around it. — Read the rest

1h

A catalog of our distant space probes

Spaceprob.es is a handsome catalog of our most far-flung machines, from Voyager 1 (now 22.75bn miles away and scheduled to swing by Gliese 445 in about 40,000 years' time) to Chang'e 5-T1, chilling out in lunar orbit.

1h

Album released on PC Engine HuCard

The musician Remute specializes in albums released on classic game console cartridges, and the latest is Electronic Lifestyle, available in physical form on PC Engine HuCard only. I'm a techno musician from Germany and I just released the first music album on a PC Engine gameconsole HuCard. — Read the rest

2h

The graphics card sadness index

Even my years-old 1070Ti video card is worth more now than it was brand-new, thanks to the latest crypto boom. The latest models are fetching astronomical prices, scalped by the truckload and vanishing from online retailers within seconds of being stocked. — Read the rest

2h

Database of police settlements

Five Thirty Eight published a database of police settlements at Github—a unique body of information that reveals the financial costs incurred by America's excessively violent cops. But it cautions against using the information to draw comparisons between jurisdictions. As we describe in an accompanying article, this data has major issues. — Read...

2h

The Kilobyte's Gambit

In The Kilobyte's Gambit, Matt Round combines three things that (beyond the obvious connection) are beautiful in very different ways: Netflix's The Queen's Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy; Oscar Toledo G's single-kilobyte chess engine; and pinot's wild 80s'-style pixel art. — Read the rest

3h

Slice of Life, a love letter to Blade Runner by two fans

Last year, I wrote about Slice of Life, a Croatian fan film being made basically by two guys in a basement using homemade models and digital FX. The film is a love letter to Blade Runner and other sci-fi films of the 80s. — Read the rest

4h

Japanese scientists find water and organic matter on Itokawa asteroid

Scientists have found water and organic matter on the surface of an asteroid sample collected from the solar system – the first time that such material has been found on an asteroid.The sample, which was only a single grain, came from asteroid 'Itokawa' by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (Jaxa) first Hayabusa mission in 2010. — Read the rest

5h

If you want a better understanding of Blockchain, this training can answer all of your questions

Terms like revolutionary and groundbreaking get thrown around a lot in the tech arena. Sometimes, they're warranted. Other times…not so much. Then, there are buzzy new paradigm-shifting technologies that, even for all of their press, might actually be underrated in light of their ultimate global impact. — Read the rest

10h